THE ADVENTURES OF MAXI AND MOXIE

BooksForABuck.com, June 2010

Chasing a headline is just a job for ace reporter Moxie Donnovan, but sometimes those headlines turn on him and bite. Moxie, along with his sexy better half, Maxi (a theater and film actor) face a tiger-sized panther, mechanical gunmen who support the master race, Irish Fae with the urge to pay Moxie back for the loot his grandfather took from them, murder and a hypnotist intent on re-filming Ben Hur.

Author Teel James Glenn (see more BooksForABuck.com reviews of works by Glenn) writes a compelling fantasy adventure inspired by the pulp fiction of the 1930s (with evil nazis, sinister magic, and a wise-cracking and sympathetic protagonist in Moxie). Although Glenn's work pays homage to the classics of the 1930s, he gives Maxi, Moxie's love interest a far more active role than typical in the stories actually written in that era, helping to make his story resonate with the modern reader.

Glenn has done his research. Language, period details, stage and movie references, and social settings all ring true, but his emphasis is on the story rather than on the history. Magic plays an integral role in the Maxi/Moxie adventures, but somehow Moxie remains a skeptic, always looking for the human explanation for what's going on around him.

Readers of Glenn's earlier Weird Tales of the Skullmask will delight in seeing a novel-length work on the Moxie/Maxi team (the two figured in one of the Skullmask stories). Glenn even adds a teaser on the end, promising that we'll soon have more from this dynamic duo.